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Patrick Was Leading Way Even Before Winning Pole

Danica Patrick after winning the pole position for the Daytona 500. She is entering her first full season in Nascar’s Sprint Cup series.Credit
Jonathan Ferrey/Getty Images

On the first day that drivers arrived at Daytona International Speedway for Speedweeks, the Daytona 500 and the celebrated start of Nascar’s 2013 Sprint Cup season, the story making headlines was Danica Patrick’s romantic relationship with the driver Ricky Stenhouse, Jr.

On the second day, the story of the first practice session of the year was Patrick, who topped the speed charts.

On the third day, after Kevin Harvick won the Sprint Unlimited exhibition race Saturday night in an event that did not even include Patrick, Harvick opened his postrace news conference by joking, “I think the biggest thing is, how are we going to get Danica and Ricky on the front page tomorrow?”

And on the fourth day, Patrick won the pole for the Daytona 500.

You thought Patrick, known for her racy photographs and GoDaddy.com Super Bowl commercials as well as for her racing, would be a sideshow in Nascar? Right now, she is the show.

“She comes into this with a racing background, with a tremendous amount of exposure, momentum, just popularity that we’ve never seen before, especially from a female driver,” said Jeff Gordon, who qualified second and will start alongside Patrick on the front row for Sunday’s race. “For her to then follow that up or start the season off with a pole, it’s huge. It’s big. Surprised you’re even talking to me right now, right? I’m glad I didn’t win the pole; we would have messed that story all up.

“I’ve always been a big believer in what’s good for the sport is good for all of us,” Gordon added. “So this is great for the sport. The rest of us will benefit from that, as well. I’m proud to be on the front row this year, side by side with Danica.”

There you have it. Even Gordon, a four-time Cup champion and three-time winner of the Daytona 500, has relegated himself to a supporting role in this drama. As has the rest of the field right now as Patrick prepares for her first season as a full-time driver in the Sprint Cup series.

None of this seems to surprise or rattle Patrick, who owned the spotlight for years in the IndyCar Series. Little seems to have changed in Nascar. Her relationship with Stenhouse, an up-and-coming driver who will also be a rookie in the Sprint Cup this season, has only served to intensify the interest in everything she does on and off the track.

But asked Sunday if it was good to see the attention shift back to her racing, at least for the moment, Patrick said: “I definitely think it’s good for the team and it’s good for Go Daddy. It’s good for Nascar. It’s good for the race itself. When they mention who is on the pole, they’re going to mention when the race is. That’s good for the whole sport.

“I don’t mind answering questions about the other stuff,” she added. “But I get that it’s not about racing. It’s nice to change the tone of the questions because of what’s going on, on the track. That is a really good sign, and I like that.”

Either way, it’s all good for Nascar. Patrick made the rounds of many of the major television talk shows Monday morning, giving the sport some much needed publicity. Nascar has had a drop in attendance and television ratings in recent years. The marketing game plan is to focus on drivers, and nobody does a better job of self-marketing than the 30-year-old Patrick.

“Driver star power is something we’re going to bang on from a marketing perspective in ’13 and in ’14, ’15, ’16,” said Steve Phelps, Nascar’s senior vice president and chief marketing officer. “It will all be about the drivers.

“With respect to Danica, she’s got a great brand already,” he added. “She had that the day she started driving a Nascar car.”

On the track, off the track, the 24 Hours of Danica will continue with the twin qualifying races at Daytona on Thursday, Saturday’s Nationwide Series race and Sunday’s Daytona 500, all of them providing opportunities for her to continue to own the spotlight here. And with races at Daytona often a tossup, and a history of surprise winners over the years, she could emerge victorious in one of them.

Still, Patrick has much to learn about racing in the Cup series, although she has already convinced some of her Nascar peers. She raced 10 times in Sprint Cup in 2012, technically leaving her a rookie as she takes on a full load of 36 races this season.

“I think she’s done a lot better job than I ever thought,” the veteran driver Denny Hamlin said as he thought back to Patrick’s initial Cup efforts in 2012 and, in particular, to a race in Tennessee last summer. “Bristol, I won that race and I don’t think I saw her much at all and I thought I’d lap her five, six, seven, eight times.” But he didn’t, although ultimately she crashed and finished far behind.

“I think it’ll be a while before she gets to the top 10,” he added. “But I think there’ll be plenty of cars that she’ll outrun just off of speed.”

The reason for that assessment is that Patrick drives for Stewart-Haas Racing, which gets its equipment and engines from Hendrick Motorsports, perhaps the top team in the sport. As a result, her cars will be faster than some others just about every time she gets on the track.

Patrick says the new racecar being introduced this season for all the teams, the Gen 6, could help her as well. A taller spoiler in the back of the car at most races means more downforce, allowing the car to grip the track better.

“They do drive maybe a little bit tighter, so that’s kind of nice for me,” she said last week. “I mean, I’m used to having so much grip coming from IndyCar that I felt like the tracks I had more grip and was able to carry more load through the corner.”

No one can predict where Patrick will finish in her first full season in the Cup series, although she is not likely to challenge for a place in the 12-car playoff field. But in the end, Patrick’s steady presence will initially be more important to Nascar than her actual results. Outright success would be the bonus.

“Listen, she is a marketing phenomenon,” Phelps said. “I think putting her on the biggest stage that we have, the Sprint Cup, and have her run a full season, will only help her.”

He asked rhetorically: “Do I believe that she needs to win in order to continue that momentum that she has seen so far? I don’t. Would it add to it? Would it kind of plus-up the whole thing? I do.”

To be continued, as Patrick moves through the week and heads to the pole Sunday, with 500 miles in front of her and the remaining skeptics in the rear.

A version of this article appears in print on February 19, 2013, on page B9 of the New York edition with the headline: Patrick Was Leading Way Even Before Winning Pole. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe